by Ninie Hammon
“Don’t you just love to look at a sleeping baby?” she said. “So quiet and peaceful.”
Wanda stared at the woman who’d spoken to her, certain it was Melanie. And equally certain the apparition wasn’t real. Another, more elaborate hallucination. But the image seemed so real, so … Melanie. Perfect. No, not perfect. Something was off, different. Wanda couldn’t put her finger on exactly what it was, but something wasn’t right.
The room grew colder and the chill seemed to be coming from Melanie. The way a space heater emanates warmth, Melanie gave off cold.
“Here,” Melanie said. “Would you like to hold him? He’s sleeping soundly now.”
Wanda shrank back. She didn’t want to offend Melanie, so she blurted out, “I might wake him up and he’d start crying again.” She shook her head. “I can’t stand that crying.”
“He was only crying because he was alone. As soon as I picked him up and cuddled him, he went right off to sleep.”
Melanie stepped closer and the cold moved with her.
“You do know that’s why they’re crying, don’t you?” she said. “They’re alone and frightened. They don’t have any mommies to look after them, to pick them up and comfort them. So they cry. You did know that, didn’t you?”
“No,” Wanda stammered.
“And you do know that they’re not going to stop crying until somebody holds them and soothes them?”
“But … who’s going to do that?”
“Right! Who’s going to do that? You took them away from their mommies and now they’re all alone.”
Somewhere inside Wanda, the voice of the little reason she had left cried out that she had to stop talking to this figment of her imagination, had to stop participating in her own lunacy. But she ignored it. The illusion of Melanie was better than no Melanie at all.
“I didn’t mean to leave them alone, Mel. I didn’t know. I was just trying to help. Those girls, they were so desperate, so hopeless. What else could I do?”
“Wanda, honey, you should have sent their mommies with them, to take care of them,” Melanie said.
And Wanda saw then part of what wasn’t right about her. Melanie’s tongue was black, solid black.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do, Wanda. You know exactly what I mean. Those mothers got up and walked away from here and left you with their babies. Lonely, crying babies. You shouldn’t have let all those mothers abandon their babies to cry, endlessly cry, inconsolable. You should have kept them both here, the mothers and their babies.”
Melanie sighed. Her breath frosted in the cold air gathered around her.
“It’s too late now, though. The mothers are gone and the babies are here and you’re just going to have to listen to them cry.”
“But I can’t Melanie,” Wanda wailed. And her breath frosted when she spoke, too. “I can’t listen to them cry, night after night. And there’s other things, too. Dead babies lying … I came to talk to you about it, came to the—”
“I know you came to me. Why do you think I’m here?”
“Melanie, stay here with me. Please, don’t go away again.”
“I can’t do that Wanda. But if you do what I tell you, we can be together.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“My baby girl, Joy, she came to see you yesterday.”
Wanda looked pleadingly into Melanie’s eyes. “Did I do wrong? I promised myself after—” She indicated the baby sleeping in Melanie’s arms.”— that I’d never do it again. Should I have said no?”
Melanie smiled a wide smile and Wanda saw it wasn’t just her tongue that was black. Her lips were black, too.
“If my Joy wants to send her baby away, I’m glad you agreed to help her.”
Wanda sighed, relaxed.
“The baby’s a girl, a granddaughter, and you don’t want her to cry, do you? Cry and cry so you never get any sleep?”
When Wanda looked stricken, Melanie leaned closer and whispered softly. “Then you can’t leave the baby alone. You have to send her mother away with her.”
Melanie reached out and placed her hand tenderly on Wanda’s shoulder. It was as cold as a stone in the night. “I want my baby here with me. My baby Joy and my baby granddaughter. You could send them to me. Or …” She smiled broadly. “You could bring them. That way you and I could be together.”
When Wanda didn’t respond, Melanie continued in that calm, soothing voice of hers. “You’re so tired, Wanda. Why don’t you leave this place where you can’t sleep? Come here with me and it will be peaceful and quiet. Forever.”
“Forever,” Wanda repeated.
“You know what you have to do, don’t you, Wanda?” Melanie cooed.
Wanda looked up into her eyes. She remembered that they were a warm, amber shade of brown. But in this light, they were black holes in Melanie’s face with shiny things way down in the depths of them, things Wanda didn’t want to see.
Reason cried out in desperation, “Wanda Jean Ingram, this is not real! You know it’s not! Get ahold of yourself! This is just a—” Then Wanda silenced reason. Just like she’d silenced that little baby. She put her fingers around the last slender thread of rationality inside her and squeezed. Held on tight while it struggled, until it stopped wiggling, stopped breathing. Squeezed until her sanity was stone cold dead.
“I know what I have to do,” Wanda told Melanie. “Bring you Joy and the baby.”
Wanda heard the soft thumping sound Blackbeard made when he jumped up onto the bed. He wasn’t allowed on the bed, but this time she turned around, lifted him up and cuddled him in her arms. He felt warm in the bone-chilling cold.
When she turned back, Melanie was gone.
But it was quiet. So quiet Wanda could hear the ticking of the alarm clock on the night stand. She reached over and flipped the switch on the lamp and plunged the room into darkness. Then she snuggled up with Blackbeard, shivering under the warm chenille bedspread. The soft hum of his purring sent her quickly off to sleep.
Chapter 20
Princess sat on the bunk in her cell and watched the light drain out of that little patch of sky held prisoner by the barred window high on the wall. Thoughts started to steal over her mind as dark as the lengthening afternoon shadows. As blackness slowly filled the two-by-two-foot square above her, Princess struggled to keep it from filling her soul as well.
It was all moving so fast and her head was so full up with things. It’d been dang nigh empty for years. Day in, day out, the sun come up, the sun went down and nothing happened in between. Absolutely nothing. There’d been years of that.
But now! More had happened to her in the past four days than in all the days she’d spent in the Long Dark put together! It’d give her enough to think about for another fourteen years. But she didn’t have another fourteen years. She didn’t have another twenty-four hours. This time tomorrow, she’d be dead.
The realization hit her with such force she was suddenly sick. She jumped up and ran across the cell to the toilet on the far wall and vomited, gagging and heaving until she was weak and panting and tears slathered her cheeks.
She flushed the mess down but the odor lingered. She could smell it even after she sat heavily on the side of her bunk again. So much for the “last meal.” It’d been good goin’ down, a chocolate ice cream and a McDonald’s hamburger and fries—though they was cold. But it had sure scalded her throat coming back up. She better not try to eat tomorrow.
But if she didn’t, she’d never eat again.
Never.
Right now that was the terriblest word she knew. Never sucked all the air out of her lungs and left her gasping like a minnow on a flat rock.
What had she done? What had she got herself into?
Her heart slugged violently in her chest. She could smell the sticky-sweet odor of her own sweat and she drew breaths in hitches. The rip in her side was so huge right now she was about to come completely apart, the top of her not attache
d to the bottom of her at all.
Death crawled into her cell then to keep her company in her final hours, a bloated, hairy-legged spider lurking in the corner just out of sight, its fangs dripping, waiting to take her. Its putrid stench filled the air, the rank stink of a dead animal.
She whimpered, wrapped her arms around herself and rocked back and forth on the bunk in the sudden chill, making sounds a baby rabbit might make if it got caught in a threshing machine. She started to tremble violently and her mind scrambled to find something to hold onto, a piece of driftwood to keep her from drowning in terror on the last night of her life.
She stopped rocking suddenly, sat still. Then she shook her head and straightened her back. Her last night. What kind of fool wastes her last night being miserable? If this was all the time she had left, she'd fairly well better make the best of it!
The pounding of her heart slowed; she stopped panting. Now that she could think, she concentrated hard, tried to figure what she ought to do, how she should spend the precious currency of seconds and minutes she had left.
She already knew how she shouldn’t spend them—thinkin’ ’bout Jackson Prentiss!
She’d already wasted precious minutes—all right, hours—thinking about him when she come back to her cell from his visit. Was so tore up over what he’d said, she almost didn’t want that last dinner Talbot brought her.
But she couldn’t do nothing about Jackson. She couldn’t help all those people he was hurtin’ and was ’gonna hurt. She had to just … let it go.
And concentrate on good things.
Like … well, she had some goodbyes she needed to say. And she wanted to sing—if she could. Her mouth bein’ so dry, she wasn’t sure she could make much sound a’tall come out of it.
And she wanted to open the jewel box of memories and run her fingers through the piles of precious lighted stones, feel the warmth of their throbbing colors on her face. Live every one of those moments over again.
One more time.
She leaned back against the cold wall and breathed in the stillness and silence. Then she began to sing. At first her voice was raspy, but it soon smoothed out and she belted out the songs she’d made up in her head over the years, one after the other. She sang in a language nobody but she understood, the melodies odd and somehow Irish-sounding.
In her mind, she wasn’t alone in the cell anymore. She sang every song to her precious Angel, pictured the child lying warm in her arms, snuggling close, looking up at her with those caramel-colored eyes.
Princess sang for hours until she was so hoarse she could sing no longer. Then she examined her jewels, picked up each precious one and squeezed all the light and love and joy out of it. She drank all her memories dry, and sat on her bed smiling and full.
When her joy vanished, it happened in an instant.
A huge, menacing darkness formed in her mind between one heartbeat and the next, a swirling, horrifying madness so enormous it wouldn’t all fit into her head at one time. Her face frozen in a monstrous cramp of terror, she sucked in a breath to scream, but horror tore such a huge hole under her ribs the air whooshed out and she couldn’t make a sound.
The madness was coming. Rumbling, roaring, thundering toward her in a freight-train rush of utter destruction. The Big Ugly was out there in the darkness somewhere. It would rip open the sky, chew up the world and kill people. She could see their mangled, unrecognizable bodies and hear their screams.
Princess was held captive by the vision, riveted by the hideous savagery of it. Only one power on earth was strong enough to grant release and finally it came for her. A jerking, flopping, foaming-at-the-mouth fit stole her mind away from the Big Ugly and left her unconscious on her bunk, soiled and sweating as the sun began to bleach the night out of the sky on the last day of Emily Gail Prentiss’s life.
* * * * *
As soon as Jonas opened the front door of his house, he heard Maggie. Her voice came from the bedroom, where she was screaming random obscenities, whatever filthy word happened to drop into her mind.
Even now, it still hit him like a fist in the belly.
He went into the kitchen where Lupe was putting the finishing touches on a pan of her homemade enchiladas. The woman was a saint, couldn’t stand to “just sit,” so for the price of a caretaker for Maggie, he also got a part-time housekeeper and cook.
“Mr. Cunningham,” she said, and looked relieved to see him. “You can have these for supper mañana.” She set the pan of enchiladas in the refrigerator. “Just heat them up in the oven.”
Then she looked at him sadly, “Your wife, she has had a bad day, sí?”
“I’m sorry. You should have called me.”
Lupe shook her head. “It is just hard to see her this way. I do not want to live so long, if this is what it will be like.”
“She wouldn’t have wanted to, either,” Jonas said softly.
“Before I go, I need to warn you about something.” She told him she’d found Maggie that afternoon in the bathroom about to take a handful of random pills. “I almost had to fight her to get them away from her. She said they were her medicína. You need to be very careful; she might try it again.”
For a long time after Lupe left, Jonas sat at the kitchen table, stunned by the providential—or so it seemed—turn of events. If he gave Maggie the sleeping pills now, Lupe would be the first to point out that the poor woman had almost poisoned herself before. No one would ever suspect that Jonas had given her a lethal dose on purpose.
His heart began to pound and he broke out in a cold sweat.
Could he really poison his wife? Could he actually … kill her?
As if she could hear him thinking about her, Maggie began to call his name, in a sing-song whine that sounded like a little girl.
“Joonas, oooh, Jooonas!”
He got up and headed toward the bedroom. As he got nearer, he smelled a rank, disgusting odor.
Maggie was sitting in bed with something … brown smeared all over her.
Oh no!
“Maggie, what have you done?”
She didn’t answer, just looked down and smeared more of the substance on her arm, like it was hand lotion!
“Maggie, don’t!” He rushed across the room. The stench was horrible. She’d made a mess in her diaper and was playing in it like a two-year-old. He didn’t even know where to begin to clean her up. It was everywhere. On her nightgown, in the bed. In her hair!
“Come on, sweetheart, let’s go take a bath—what do you say?”
She looked at him sweetly and dropped the F-word, a word his sweet wife couldn’t even bear to hear. But the reality of life was that this shell of a human being was no longer his sweet wife. She was somebody he didn’t know, somebody she’d never have wanted to become.
He went into the bathroom and ran a bath of warm water and put her sweet-smelling bubble bath in it. Then he went back to the bedroom, where she was still entertaining herself with her own …
He took her by the arm and helped her out of bed, stripped the filthy nightgown off her and eased her down into the warm water. She splashed in it like a baby, sending water all over the floor. Then he took the sheets and covers into the laundry room, along with her nightgown. He had to rinse everything off in the big laundry sink before he put it in the washing machine. It’d take at least three loads to clean it all.
After he checked on Maggie, who was now sitting listlessly in the water, batting at the bubbles, he got cleaning materials out of the cabinet under the sink in the kitchen and cleaned up the bed frame, the nightstand, the headboard and the spots on the hardwood floor. He put clean sheets and pillowcases on the bed and got another blanket out of the hall linen closet.
Armed with a fresh nightgown, he went into the bathroom to clean her up. She still had big chunks in her hair, and she never liked for him to wash her hair. Lupe had gotten her ready for bed and had let her hair down. So the mess in her beautiful white locks was heartbreaking.
He p
oured water over her head out of a pitcher, shampooed and rinsed, over and over. She cried when he got water in her eyes, fought when he soaped her head. It must have taken close to an hour to get her cleaned up and back in bed.
Jonas was worn out; Maggie was wide awake.
“Jonas,” she said softly. He was changing into his pajamas and had his back to her. Hearing his name like that sounded so “normal” his eyes flooded with tears. Oh, to be able to turn around and Maggie would be there, his Maggie, and they could talk about their day. He’d tell her about Princess and Joy and what he and Mac had to do tomorrow. He’d tell her about finding the savings account passbook in Joy’s purse, and ask what she—
“Jonas, did you forget?”
He turned around and she was sitting on the side of the bed, her feet on the floor like she was about to get up. She had that deceptively lucid look on her face.
“Forget what, sweetheart?”
“You did, didn’t you? You forgot that today’s our anniversary!”
She put her head in her hands and started to cry.
He went around the bed and sat down beside her and put his arm around her shoulders.
“I didn’t forget, sugar! Why, I sent you candy and flowers—don’t you remember?”
She stopped crying and looked up at him, tears streaming down her cheeks. “You did?”
“Why, of course I did! I wouldn’t forget something as important as the anniversary of when my best friend became my wife.” He choked on the words, and she responded to the emotion in his voice.
“Oh, thank you, honey.” She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “Five years—it’s gone by so fast! But we’ve got the rest of our lives to spend together.”
If she says she wants to grow old with me, I’ll lose it! I will!
She didn’t, just tried to get to her feet.
“Hey, where you going?”
“I’ve got to go check on the baby, silly. I’ll be right back.”
“Tell you what, why don’t you just settle yourself in bed and I’ll check on the baby.”
“You’re a sweetie,” she said cheerily. He helped her back under the covers, then went to push the laundry through. He’d bought Maggie a clothes dryer Christmas before last. She’d got where she didn’t like to walk on the grass, even with shoes on, to hang clothes on the line in the back yard. It had seemed like quite an extravagance at the time, but once he’d dried his face a time or two on towels that felt all fluffy like, he knew it wouldn’t be long before driers caught on, before most everybody had one.